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The Party of "No"

Technorati and Me

Technorati is indexing me again! They had to make a code change to fix
the problem with my blog getting stuck in their queue. Kudos to Eric M.
and the guys at
GetSatisfaction.com
where they have "community powered support for Technorati".

Well, they're "sorta, kinda" indexing me anyway. It's on a 24 hour tape
delay or something. So I never get picked up by Memeorandum because they
pull from Technorati and Technorati has stuff I posted yesterday
listed as my latest blog entry. And that's old news to Memeorandum.

Wankers.

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The LED light bulbs in Terminal B at Newark Liberty International Airport
are spying on you. Yes, the light bulbs.

Whether or not you pay any attention to the lighting overhead, the lighting
may be paying close attention to you.

There are cases when a
LED light can spy by covertly listening and then send that audio over 300
meters away to the eavesdropper. But this time, it is the LED fixtures that
are the "backbone" of a new surveillance system scrutinizing and recording us.
The New York Times
reported that 171 LED fixtures inside Terminal B at Newark Liberty
International Airport are "watching" us.

Using an array of sensors and eight video cameras around the terminal, the
light fixtures are part of a new wireless network that collects and feeds data
into software that can spot long lines, recognize license plates and even
identify suspicious activity, sending alerts to the appropriate staff.

It's not the "green" side of saving energy by automatically turning the lights
off and on that has the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey excited and
"already talking about expanding it to other terminals and buildings." Instead,
the excitement comes from the mountains of data captured by sensors and
analyzed by software about "the habits of ordinary citizens."

As LED lighting becomes more ubiquitous, so does the government's capability
for surveillance. And because they're
programmable, the spy technology is built-in to every Philips Hue bulb
ever manufactured.

This is why we can't have incandescent light bulbs. "Saving energy" is just a
distraction. The capability to spy on us and mine all that data is the Real
Prize.

Let's get real. The light fixtures and LEDs at Newark Airport are not about
saving energy … it's about watching us, analyzing data about us and
storing it for who knows how long. As Justin Brookman from the Center for
Democracy and Technology told the Times, "There are some people in the
commercial space who say, 'Oh, big data — well, let's collect everything,
keep it around forever, we'll pay for somebody to think about security later.'"

The irony is they're doing this at an aiport named "Liberty."

The danger is that pretty soon they'll be doing it in your living room.